Discord's Best Alternative?
A community admin spent a year scoring every serious Discord alternative across five criteria - functionality, openness, security, safety, and decentralization - for a 3,000-member server. The winner? Discourse, a forum platform, at 19/25. Runner-up Rocket.Chat scored 18/25. Discord itself only managed 13/25.
The hard truths: real-time chat is great for the honeymoon phase of a community.. but terrible for long-term. Several people are typing... optimizes for your dopamine, it doesn't care if information remains discoverable.
Reminder: Search on discord remains in never-ending despair mode.
The security problems are the real story.
Matrix scored 1/5 on safety - its moderation tooling assumes good-faith participants, which is a fantasy at scale.
Signal is built for secrecy, not communities. Zulip's moderation is entirely reactive.
Mattermost starts at $10/user and is designed for Fortune 100 compliance, not hobbyist communities.
Only Discourse matched Discord's 4-5 range on moderation, with the added bonus of making mod decisions public by default.
TL;DR - No perfect migration exists. Every option trades one set of problems for another. The blogs are worthless.
Personally I say lets just give IRC v3 a try!
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